![]() ![]() Britain controlled Hong Kong back then, and the apartment was safe from the Chinese agents who would have killed Yu if they knew where he was hiding. Guards from the CIA’s Office of Security kept watch from a nearby flat and from across the street. The week after Yu Qiangsheng defected from China, he was closeted in a safe house in Repulse Bay, facing the sea. But the characters in this story inhabit the world of imagination. And, certainly, the starting point of Yu’s defection is accurate. This isn’t a “true” account of what happened in the spy wars between the CIA and the Chinese Ministry of State Security over the past few decades. The spy world, as people so often say, is painted in “shades of gray,” and its facts are embossed with fiction. They create “legends” for their operatives to document an imaginary past. Intelligence agencies give their real-life assets invented names, as in a novel. China’s spymasters gradually regained their balance and a decade ago, they shattered the network of CIA informants inside the country, killing or arresting more than two dozen people. But it is the nature of intelligence that nothing is what it at first appears. Then it could feed as its leisure.When Yu Qiangsheng, a top official of the Ministry of State Security, stole across the border to Hong Kong in November 1985, he left behind a fragile Chinese intelligence service that seemed ready to collapse. It would then repeatedly slam the small mammal into the ground until it killed it. Scientists believe it would catch its prey, hold it down with its talons and then clutch it between its jaws. It is assumed that it used its great size and speed for hunting its prey. That is faster than a horse! Just another tool in its arsenal of weapons which would have made this bird very scary. Scientists have estimated it to have been able to run at about 35 miles per hour. One of the most interesting facts about Terror Bird is that while it was incapable of flight, it could run at amazing speeds. Especially since it loved eating small mammals. ![]() It would have been feared by just about any small mammal it came across. It had a very large head that was equipped with a very sharp beak, had clawed wings and large talons on its feet. When it lived, it was about 8 feet tall and weighed in the neighborhood of 300 pounds. Looking at Terror Bird pictures will quickly give you an idea why this bird was given its name. However, he was wrong and it was recognized as a bird. He initially didn’t believe that Terror Bird was an actual bird. When it was first named by Florentino Ameghino, he gave it a name that didn’t end with “ornis”, which is the usual was to end the name of a fossilized bird because that’s the Greek word for “bird.” And this wasn’t an oversight. While it was given the name Phorusrhacos, a name which means “rag bearer,” it’s been unofficially referred to as the Terror Bird, and that’s because it must have been a bird that struck terror into the mammals that lived in South America during the Middle Miocene – or about 12 million years ago. The Terror Bird – also known as Phorusrhacos – was a large carnivorous bird that was discovered by Florentino Ameghino in the spring of 1887 in Santa Cruz, Argentina. ![]()
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